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Comment by splitbrain | Hacker News Reader

"20-01-2015" - seriously?

What is your problem with this? This is how dates are communicated in large swaths of the world (dd-mm-yyyy), including my home country. Sure, it would be better to use ISO8601 in a standard like this, but you don't see non-Americans responding with "seriously?" when an American uses "mm/dd/yyyy" (which happens a lot).

Perhaps try to be a little more open minded, and if you do decide to deliver criticism then perhaps do so in a constructive manner, instead of "seriously?".

Not only this is common all around the world but it is also "ordered" correctly. dd/mm/yyyy (smallest, middle, largest) makes a lot more sense than mm/dd/yyyy (middle, smallest, largest).

Note the example didn't use dd/mm/yyyy. It used dd-mm-yyyy. Generally you can assume that a dash delimited date will be in European format while a slash delimited date will be American. The problems arise when British (and former British colonies) are added to the mix, because we use the European format with slashes.

The only truly unambiguous format is yyyymmdd.

Not sure how yyyymmdd is unambiguous. 10111012 do you mean 10th Nov 1012 or 1011 Oct 12th

How old are the people using this CV format?! For any date that would appear on in someone's work history yyyymmdd is not ambiguous, but if you're being really strict then a delimiter would fix the problem.

It really doesn't though.

Think about the sorting use case: Say you've got a bunch of files on your system with the date as the first part of the filename, what is more meaningful, sorting by year (2015-01-19_file), or by the date (19-01-2015_file). Clearly, sorting by year the files were created is more meaningful than sorting by the day of the month the files were created.

Edit: I completely misread your comment as saying that smallest to largest is more useful than largest to smallest, rather than the weird month-day-year thing we use in America. Completely agree an ordering by specificity is more useful, but going from least to most specificity makes it much easier to order things in a useful way.

yyyy/mm/dd is ordered even more correctly. With dd/mm/yyyy the most significant digit is the 5th of eight and the least is the 2nd.

As a non-American, seriously was close to one of my first thoughts too. Then again, I think when my fellow Canadians use that format - it's inherently ambiguous, and most likely to be understood only/mostly by Americans.

(We're more likely to use dd/mm/yy, but that's still ambiguous, and is most likely to confuse Americans.... I always use yy/mm/dd in the completely unvalidated and taken on faith belief that it will be clear. YMMV, etc.)

Right, this should have been ISO8601 to remove any ambiguity. I just think it's surprising and offensive that:

1) People consider the American format to be the one and only legitimate format, and everything else is met with resistance 2) I am getting downvoted for stating this

It wouldn't surprise me if the OP is not an American, and they simply used the format native to them. Do we really consider this enough reason to start ridiculing it?

Do they use it in protocols?

JSON Schema already (optionally) supports datetimes, they definitely shouldn't make up their own way: http://json-schema.org/latest/json-schema-validation.html#an...

I love the goal of the project though.

This is just afternoon hack to see if there is any demand for it.

It should be ISO, but before I allocate time to work on it I'd like to see if there any demand.

Obligatory post to cut this argument short http://xkcd.com/1179/

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